The Ghost of Christmas Future
So now that we have seen the past and the present, it's time to focus on the future. The future, you say? Yes, the future, but not the distant future. Rather, let's look at the next two to five years.
Lesson snippets
Lessons have become shorter and shorter. As such, many of them are perfectly timed to become just-in-time lessons, that is, lesson snippets. Just-in-time will become more pronounced than it is even today, and those courses that require longer lessons will be evermore relegated to those needed to complete online college courseware.
Text is toast
We no longer see courses made up of screens full of text and an occasional image. Have you wondered why? Perhaps it's because most people surmised that if they had to read that much text, they would have been more comfortable with a book in their hands, or at the very least a Kindle or PDA. We were severely under-employing the power of the computer. Now we see a lot less text and a lot more media. The future will hold even less text and even more media. Many are now using YouTube and similar sites to learn. So many activities in our work lives are process-oriented. Text often doesn't do the trick in helping people learn what they need, at least not alone. Despite the fact that it's cheap (especially when written by those who can't really write!), the amount of text is being reduced.
Deliver anywhere
I love learning languages — I carry little Russian phrases in my wallet and I carry audio and text lessons on my cell phone. For that matter, I could load Spanish or German video lessons on my cell too. I can learn from books, online, on my phone, from almost anywhere and anything. This will become more and more prevalent. Just as learning has become less stand-alone, so will it be available in many new forms.
I haven't even mentioned the advent of the World Wide Web. Why not? Oh, come on! It's been around forever now, at least in computer years. We have been enjoying faster speed surely, but we have been able to deliver learning over the Web for quite some time now.
Cloud learning
However, just as is true of other types of applications, we are reaching a point in the near future when you may not even know where learning is located. RSS and Web portals gather together information that you indicate you find interesting into one location. For all intents and purposes, when you go to your Google or Yahoo home page, and you see all that information collected together, you don't think about where that information is really residing. As far as you're concerned, it's all right there in front of you.
The same will be true of e-Learning. Lessons will be gathered to form a cohesive learning curriculum from disparate sources, and it will be presented to you in a unified fashion. You will not know that this image comes from one Website and this lesson comes from another. You'll see what you need to see, and all of it will be coming from out there, from the Internet dispersed all over the world. Oh, yes, there will be some control over the process, but you too will have the ability to control much of what you see.
Authoring tools
Authoring tools have become easier to use and have allowed many to design and develop learning faster than ever before. That does not necessarily mean that it has led to better e-Learning. In fact, it many cases, it's just as bad as it has been in the past.
However, many authoring tools have now moved to the Web. Many of them allow you to author on the Web directly, even collaborating with others, without having to install anything on your system. So far, the experience is less than ideal, as no matter how fast the speed of your connection, it still seems that response time is slow whenever you try to do something in a Web-based tool. That too will change.
Back to the future
The future then will allow us to create e-Learning that is ever-smaller, more directed, more media-rich, and less text-heavy. It will allow us to collaborate on the creation of lessons online. It will allow us to pull together resources from a number of sources and present them as one unified experience.
Instructional design will continue to be important. A good programmer will still come in handy. Let us hope that the amount of bad, boring, wasteful e-Learning becomes less as people become more savvy, and as their time becomes even more limited.
Vive bonne e-Learning! Vive la revolution!
